Coaching businesses have memberships that have client data and payment information in multiple places on multiple tech platforms. Because all the information is split in multiple places, it is hard for them to get a big-picture view. There are a lot of inefficiencies in that system that slows the coaching businesses down.
Coaching businesses have their email list and their CRM data in Ontraport. Then, they have a membership site with a plugin that takes payment data and manages subscriptions. This plugin integrates with their CRM, and they can take payments through Ontraport instead.
So, now, they have subscriptions going through not only this plugin but also through Ontraport. It can be easier by knowing the tech stack and how to set it up efficiently. Even if the coaching business is in the middle, they can still fix this, but only if they are aware of this.
Choose one payment processing system and CRM, whether it is HubSpot or Ontraport, and do not use other platforms for taking payments, because that way, all the data just gets lost.
It depends on how coaching businesses are taking payments. What helps is:
Another thing with Ontraport that is very useful is that there is only one automation for each product. For example, someone has a membership, but they need to be able to handle not only the onboarding part of the client experience, but also if the payment needs to be revoked because the payment failed, or there are other types of automation that happen within the whole payment processing realm inside Ontraport. So, instead of having an automation for onboarding, and then another automation for if the payment fails and they have to revoke access, we actually put it all in one big automation map. What that does is making it so much easier to manage where a client is, if they have made their payment or they are in the payment revoked portion of the automation. In Ontraport, having that one big map like that is really efficient. It may be different in the Infusion software or HubSpot.
Besides hiring a consultant to give them the most efficient way to set up automation, someone on their team could learn the most efficient way to use the tech stack.
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That way, they can make the processes for setting up automation. In the beginning, when they are doing lots of things manually, they know what is actually worthwhile to automate.
What I do a lot is ask my team what their biggest pain points are. Is it managing client data or designing and maintaining websites. So, we try new things to try to improve our processes. Sometimes the team is focused on the day-to-day, and we could be so much more efficient if we just take the time and actually look at what we are doing.
A lot of the coaching businesses are doing one-to-one coaching, and they don’t have any kind of membership site component. Maybe they just have Slack or Facebook group that they run a community on. They just have all the calls on Zoom and they post the replay links in the group.
And then, there are others that have a full-blown membership site with a mouth-to-mouth subscription and they post replays and call schedules on it.
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I always ask people if they really want to build a WordPress custom membership site. Because it is going to be a lot more work to build and maintain it, and more expensive than something that is a little bit simpler, like Kajabi or Squarespace.
At this point, it becomes a question of migration. For example, if someone is looking at Kajabi and they are housing their email list, which is their CRM, it is basically just a list of names and emails. If they are housing that in something like Mailer Light or Convert Kit, or some of the smaller email marketing software, and they are ready to start a membership on Kajabi, what I would encourage them to do is to just migrate to Kajabi. That is the simplest route. That way, they keep their list, their marketing list in a separate convert kit, and they have their clients in Kajabi.
However, when they really start scaling, it is going to be so much easier to have it all in one place. Also, having a consistent way of naming the tags that they are using to segment their client’s and audience data, is going to make their life so much easier.
There is no one amazing CRM that works for everyone. They all have pros and cons. Coaching businesses need this amazing software, they need something that houses course modules, and platforms like Thikific or Teachable could do the job. They are not quite membership platforms, but starting really simple until they know exactly what they need is OK.
